Edit video on Chromebooks with WeVideo

Chromebooks are becoming a popular choice for schools around the US. Some teachers, though have expressed concern over what seems to be limited functionality. After all, if you can only produce content online, how are teachers supposed to do things like video creation?

WeVideo is the best tool I've found to give kids the tools to create, store and share video projects. This is primarily because it's free and it publishes videos directly to Google Drive. Note the use of the word "publish" instead of "save". Here is how it works: You create videos on their servers and are then given the option to publicly publish your video to the internet. In the free version, all videos are public by default. Once you publish the video to your Google Drive account however, making it private is simple. Just adjust the Sharing settings as you would with any other file. Keep in mind that if you have any privacy concerns, you'll have to be careful to adjust the sharing settings to every video you produce.

This option to save to Google Drive is important. First, it gives you immediate control over who may see your students' videos. For example, share the videos with parents, but prevent anyone else for seeing them. You'll also have a simple way of managing all those video files that come in. Put them into folders and organize them in a way that makes sense for you. The Google Drive app provides even more power. With it, those videos can be streamed (without being saved) to mobile devices. If you have the app yourself, you'll be able to take video with a smartphone and simply upload them to your Drive account. From there, you'll be able to edit them with WeVideo.

There are other video editors out there that are both free and produce a decent final video. Thus far, all of them have fatal flaws. Consider Youtube editor. The final result is in Youtube's proprietary format which means you have to use a third party application to download the video. Possibly more problematic is that Youtube is blocked in many school districts, so this wouldn't even be an option. Other video editors store your finished product on their own servers which may be fine. However, they just might reserve the right to use your video as part of their promotional material. "Free" accounts often come with some strings attached. So give this a try and let me know what you think.

Embed a video from Google Docs

In our school system, youtube is blocked, so I wouldn't be able to upload any class videos and share them with my students.
Fortunately, I can embed videos strait from Google Drive. Instead of explaining how it's done, I thought it would be more appropriate to put a quick video together showing you how it's done. I chose not to add sound, but you certainly could.




I would appreciate comments and suggestions on how this could work for a flipped classroom.

Awesome Note as a Classroom Tool

Source: http://sebastian.laxell.fi/files/awesome_note-300x300.jpg

Last time, I wrote about how great Awesome Note (aNote) is. Many of you loved it and I’m grateful to everyone who took the time to read that post. I left something out of it, though. This blog is dedicated to technological learning tools, and I never said a word about how to use aNote to either learn or teach. Let me correct that oversight now.

Teaching

• Grading bulky projects like the vinegar/ baking soda volcano- Take a snapshot of the project you need to grade. After syncing with Google, go online and grade the project. This way, you don’t have to stay after to grade nor do you have to worry about lugging the projects home.  
• Opportunistic slides- Have you ever seen something that you would love to show to your students? Snap a picture and add it to your notes. After syncing with Google, you’ll be able to create a nice, classroom friendly visual aide.
• Lesson Planning- If you teach more than one group of kids, you’re bound to ask this classic question: “Did I tell you all this or did I just tell it to the other students?” A lesson checklist gets around this conundrum. Typing the list in Docs ahead of time makes this a breeze.  
• Share your notes- You can adjust the privacy settings in Google Docs. That means that you can make one or all of your aNote folders viewable by whomever you want. This way, you can easily add class notes to a shared folder by doing nothing more than typing a note and syncing.

Learning

Note: Evernote is much better for archiving information, since it recognizes and can search any words on any picture you upload. The problem is that it costs money to upload a large number of snapshots to Evernote at one time. If you want to upload more, be prepared to pay.

• Making notes about what you read- Snap a picture of the book or worksheet and make some notes about that section.
• Photograph the board, overheads- Photograph the teacher’s board while she’s lecturing. Later, you can go into Docs to add some notes.
• Pics of handouts- Snap pictures of handouts or sections of the handouts for future reference.
• Create reference cards- Create some simple notes in Google Docs and sync them to aNote on your phone or tablet. That way, you’ll always have them handy.
• Share folders, share notes- I mentioned this in the section on teaching. You can share Google Docs folders. That means the folders you’ve synced with aNote can also be shared with whomever you like.
• Online Study Groups- Google hangouts allows you to work collaboratively on a Google Doc with the people in the hangout. You could start a hangout with classmates and pull up notes that you’ve taken in class.

One more thing. Using aNote to collect all this data could take up gigabytes of valuable space on your device. It’s easy to transfer notes if you sync with Docs. Just move the notes out of the folder called Awesome Notes in your Google Docs account. It doesn’t matter where you put them. Maybe you could make a folder called “Old Notes”. Once those files are out of the Awesome Note folder, the notes will be erased from you device during your next sync and safely stored online.

Awesome Note +Google Drive

Source: http://sebastian.laxell.fi/files/awesome_note-300x300.jpg

Many of us organize our entire existence around our smartphones. I’m no exception. I depend on that little iPhone for my work and personal life. The phone, though is only as good as the apps I use. Recently, I’ve started using Awesome Note and I have to say it lives up to it’s name.

This is a note-taking, to-do and calendar app all wrapped into one. While it doesn’t do everything I want, Awesome Note is probably the best overall productivity app I’ve found. As a calendar, it can read/write your iPhone’s calendar and Reminders. The to-do function is alright. As you’d expect, you can add a due date, tell it to repeat and mark the status as in progress, pending or waiting. You can also change the relative importance of a task by marking it with 0 to 5 stars. Not fantastic but not bad, either.

As befits the app’s name, it creates fantastic notes that can be modified in dozens of ways. You can add checkboxes, dates and pictures. You can choose from plenty of backgrounds and fonts as well. Add a title and tag to each note and they become easily searchable.

The notes stay well organized in folders which can be be assigned a unique color and icon. Arranging the folders is as simple as dragging and dropping and adding spaces to separate the folders into groups. This app allows for an almost infinite range of customization, which is a double edged sword. You can adjust this app to work in exactly the way you need it to. On the other hand, you might also get caught up in tweaking the app so much that it cuts into your productivity.

Awesome Note syncs with either Evernote or Google Drive. The advantage of using Evernote is that it can read the text on any picture, making search a breeze. On the other hand, you have a data upload limit on the free plan. In other words, if you plan on syncing your Awesome Note on a regular basis, you should have a paid account with Evernote. On the other hand, Google Drive is free. Sync everything. Don’t pay a dime. There are two downsides that you should be aware of, though. First, Google doesn’t read the text on pictures the way Evernote does. The other issue is really a matter of preference. Google reads your stuff. All of it. It’s not that you have a funny looking bald man reading through everything. Computers analyze your emails and documents to find patterns that they can use to feed you personalized ads. I’m OK with that. I don’t pay attention to ads anyway. If privacy is a big issue for you, you’ll want to get an account with Evernote instead.

The other reason Drive is the clear choice for me is that you have a simple way to edit your notes online. To be clear, notes in Awesome Note can only become documents in Drive. Of course, it works the other way, too. Documents you make in Drive become notes. However, you won’t be able to sync Presentations, Spreadsheets, Drawings or anything else to Awesome Note.

There it is. Awesome Note in combination with Google Drive can create a fantastic system of productivity.